The sea raged

Hawkinge Crematorium. An unmarked van pulled over in the Cypresses pulls up at the drop off at 8.55 and the deed is done. He stands at the top of the Chapel Service list - a mere formality but touching nonetheless. The wind blows hard from the South East, pushing over vases of flowers left, right and centre.

On the way back the sea is exploding over the Dover Piers. I stupidly try and get out along the Admiralty Pier but the steward emerges from his shed and tells me could I not see the waves breaking. I could. But.

Down in the Bay it is pounding harder than I've seen. Looping round the old Napoleonic wall and steps I scramble through the mud and slip down to the pill-box.

This rage and wind seems right. Suits the character of the man - the conchy - who ran the 'Hotel Armstrong' (a refuge for the displaced and homeless) for the Secours Quaker in ravaged Le Havre in the spring of 1945 when the beautiful city had been razed to the ground killing five thousand or more, a questionable sacrifice to the Allied invasion, in a series of raids in September 1944 by Bomber Command under the orders of Field Marshal Montgomery.